Helpless Words

As you know, in recent months I’ve spent a lot of time with us Brits; though popping across to Italy for a holiday, where I bumped into a fan, who berated me for giving up on film. Hey, man, don’t you watch movies no more? I tried to explain…. Then Mr Raj, that crazy chap out of Anthony Burgess, comes around, and convinces me return to the cinema. In the 1950s it wasn't in Britain where modernity produced the greatest stress, the worst lunacy. No. It was in those countries whose intellectuals were taking the high-speed train to the West. Satyajit Ray, Goddess Devi. When new faiths wreck old religions.

_____________

We feel the influence of Chekhov, although it might be the social situation rather than a conscious cinematic re-creation. In the vast hinterlands of Russia and India the educated man is alone; therefore weak. How then to resist the press of local practices, the pull of ancient beliefs? How to sustain both mind and will before a cosmic indifference to one's ideas; not even argument and bile to give energy to this man's Western faith? Only an exceptional character to keep their evangelical zeal in such surroundings, where each day your ideas are ignored, your hope denuded, your loneliness intensified. No-one understands us. We hold conversations with the air.

Umaprasad is this character. But unlike a typical Chekhov hero (or heroine: many teachers were women) he is not alone - he is married. It does him no good. The tragedy is doubled not halved by his connubial tie: both he and Doyamoyee to suffer from his enthusiasm for the West. Unable to educate his wife in the ways of the Modern, he cannot free her from the customs of the countryside. Worse. His beliefs push her towards a Hindu fanaticism, that fortress against imperial conquest (ideas arrive in the same trains bringing soldiers and governors). Clever, high-minded, a keen student, Umaprasad underestimates both the power of the old ways and the destructiveness of his secondhand concepts. It’s why he leaves his wife at home when he takes his exams in the city (a few months can do no damage). Already he is cut-off from his family and its beliefs, is oblivious to their power. A typical student, drunk on ideas he doesn’t properly understand, and who underrates their dangers, doesn't grasp their unintended consequences.1 Ideas behave differently in mind and on street. 

She is alone. Thus vulnerable to the influence of her father-in-law, a fanatic of the old faith. This fanaticism a reaction against his son’s beliefs that wholeheartedly reject his own; although age and his wife’s death also contribute to such zealotry. As one grows old religious arthritis, especially in custom-bound communities, is bound to set in. But Umaprasad cannot be let off so easily. This young man has brought doubt into the household, with its usual effects: to defend itself the old religion turns extreme and intense; it becomes literal for the first time (at least since its origins). When worship is certain and unconscious, Devi or Kali can stay happily in the mind; no need to see them on the doorstep; little compulsion to have them walk the village, visit the maharajah’s palace. All changes when alien beliefs threaten: the Gods are called on to act. No longer to sit quietly in their temple niches; now they must prove their worth, show signs of their power, demonstrate the Truth. Objects of thought no more, they have to be seen and touched, their spirit embodied in living things. Only when a Goddess is present, practising her magic, are the new ideas shown helpless. 

We wish so easy…. 

Recoiling from the shock of the alien, defenders of the old faith are apt to go too far; their gods - accustomed to the ambiguities of wisdom - are forced to make promises they cannot keep. Everything to be clear, easily understood, proved. Anathema to any decent faith, which works far more on the mind than on the body. Gods prefer the misty mornings of mountain tops to noonday on the plain. But in the 20th-century medicine and magic find themselves on the same territory. A peaceful meadow suddenly a battlefield. 

The father is not wrong to associate Umaprasad’s ideas with evil. Not evil in themselves, of course, but in their consequences. An idea cannot be separated from its social effects, its praxis. What ideas do to others is what matters most. The introduction of new concepts requires skilled hands, an experienced mind, a sensibility sensitive to other people. Students usually fail the interview. The reason they often produce the evil they believe they’re eradicating (which is often no evil at all, but different ways of thinking). Radical concepts should be introduced with caution, with wisdom. Alas, this student is not wise. The effects on his father, that feeling of conceptual free fall - over house, over son, over faith - are given little thought. Yet extraordinary measures are required when a man feels his world collapsing. Only miracles to bring back the old days.

Beautiful, talented, charming, compliant: everyone - except her sister-in-law, who is jealous - loves Doyamoyee. An angel. Yet such charms are to play against our heroine. In the disintegrating mind of an old man such angelic qualities cannot exist simply as metaphor: they have to be made tangible. Relying on Doyamoyee for his existence he transforms this exceptional woman into an otherworldly figure; he dreams she is the reincarnation of the goddess Devi. Acting on this belief, he makes her the centre of a local cult, that attracts a mass following; the palace inundated with the ill and the deluded, who believe she can heal the sick and the dying.

Doyamoyee comes to believe in her powers, as both chance (some are cured) and auto-suggestion do their work. Cut off, kept inside a closed community, it is impossible not to believe you are a goddess when surrounded by those convinced of your divinity, and who so easily manufacture signs of your divine success. Insulated from outside influences she imbibes her father-in-law’s fanatic faith, now reinforced by hourly rituals and a coterie of disciples. Even the sceptical Harasundari slips into belief when her ill son calls out Doyamoyee’s name. A mad moment that will cost him his life, as Harasundari, rejecting her instincts, seeks her sister-in-law’s magic powers rather than the well-tried potions of the local medic, himself terrified to help, afraid of the old man’s wrath. Enclosed within this world, Doyamoyee comes to accept the extraordinary as commonplace; the more crazy the concepts the greater their power when appearing to work. Soon all sense of reality is lost. And it is now, when all contact with the real has gone, that tragedy hits. Try to walk on water when the tide rises you’ll drown.

On his first visit home Umaprasad tries to persuade this wife to leave his father’s palace. Attached to the household, her emotions bind her closely to his father and Khoka, her sister-in-law’s son. At this time, the belief in her own divinity is less strong than her feelings for family and home; to leave them a hard, wrenching experience. Nevertheless, it appears Umaprasad is winning, when…an unfortunate glimpse of a discarded religious float decides Doyamoyee’s destiny: her superstitious nature electrified, she tells her husband she must stay.

What should he do? To save his wife Umaprasad has to remain at home; with the risk of losing his education. Instead, he goes back to university; the passion of his new faith too strong to resist. But remorse nibbles away at his soul. Can he accept such a rejection of his own ideas, his radical new way of life? Then love with its magnetic pull.… Nibble nibble, until peace of mind is but a few crumbs on the soul’s floor. He returns. It is too late. The cult, in generating its own momentum, has gone too far; Doyamoyee asked to perform wonders impossible for humans. She must fail. She does. The family in despair, Doyamoyee collapses into madness.

There are bold headlines in the newspapers: Reactionary! Superstition! Backward!….

Is bad thinking really to blame? Too neat. Too Western! It refuses to see the foolishness of Umaprasad’s ideas; how he ignores their effects in the social world. Take the scene where he talks to his friend about the breaking of a taboo - an affair with a widow. For Umaprasad the solution is simple: I’ll tell your father that the old ideas have changed. What a dunderhead! Only a fool to believe that ideas win their own arguments; that ideas alone can change how people behave. This faith as extreme in its way as his father’s: both men believe in miracles. An idea alone, with a little help from its mates logic and rhetoric, isn’t enough to remove customs and religious practices; a whole way of life must also shift to allow in such belief-shattering innovations. Concepts are taken up only when the society itself is ready for them. A naive youth does not appreciate the complexities of social change (for Umaprasad it’s as easy as reading a book), and though appearing reasonable he is, in fact, as zealous as his old man. Crazy chaps! Both are victims of an excessive faith in the power of ideas; the father venerating them in the images of Devi, Umaprasad through his worship of the Word. Ordinary folk lack this interest. Religion, too abstract and abstruse to think about on a typical day, is taken up only when under duress or during a crisis, when a quick and remarkable solution is needed. But Ordinary Man is practical. In crises words are not enough. Beliefs that are essentially metaphysical have to be turned into things; a concept embodied in a living goddess or magicked into a natural object, with miraculous medicinal powers. Against such a need what does Umaprasad offer? Words! Madder than his old man! Doyamoyee’s feelings and habits, her absorption into the family home, these cannot be undone by a few sentences, or a reference to John Stuart Mill. Words are helpless before the rituals of everyday existence. Umaprasad’s one chance to counteract his father’s influence is by his own presence; to somehow squeeze his physical being between his wife and these lunatic notions. Not his words but his body, his soul, his sensibility could just do this trick. But then he’d have to give up his university career; maybe even discard his newly acquired faith. Bye bye Mr West…. 

It is not possible. In a time of crisis both sides pull to their own extremes. Tragedy the inevitable consequence, for at least one of the beliefs will be stretched to breaking point. Blaming herself for Khoka’s death, Doyamoyee, having lost all contact with reality, flies into madness, her one escape from the terrible truth of her own actions. The safe haven of  insanity the one refugee after a faith breaks.

Words are not enough. In a town, surrounded with fellow believers, words are buttressed by their own rituals of study, conversation, exchange. In the countryside Umaprasad’s words, like Chekhov’s teachers, must live alone. This crucial fact is overlooked. To think the power of the word itself can overcome a world is to believe in magic. Say the magical formula and - poof! - our hero saves his (highly conservative) wife from a religious cult that holds the locals spellbound. At heart this student is still an Indian; words (and the ideas they clothe) not tools of thought but beliefs to be worshipped. Democracy. Freedom. Science. So easy to become incantations, which, if repeated ad infinitum, will, like a rosary, ward off evil spirits. In contrast, a European thinks of ideas as instruments, and words as signs, pointing to things outside themselves: a university equals specialist studies; Parliament is the political process; the British Empire a conglomeration of commercial, industrial, and military might…. Not the words but the people and institutions they refer to is what we must comprehend; they to define the idea and determine how it is used. Forget the label on the lamp, it is the genie inside the lamp who wields the power. A young man has acquired the West’s faith, but has yet to understand it.2 Exit the university, leave the city, and words lose their efficacy.

We haven’t mentioned Adam and Eve. Naturally, our hero hasn’t studied the most important text in the Western scientific canon….

Young, smart, an idealist; it is natural, therefore, for Umaprasad to think new ideas, in virtue of being new, are good; and that his father’s beliefs, because outmoded, are bad. In modernity whatever is modern is thought beneficent, for it shows the superiority of the present over the past. The British Empire proves this so. Umaprasad is young, and although clever he is not sophisticated; thus he confuses epistemology with ethics, the ability to conquer countries with skill at thinking well. He cannot see that Britain’s success is because its ideas, especially its political ideas, are crude…. It is easier to change things if we simplify them. This is why we must always be wary of progressives; also the reason why progressive ideas attract the young. Quick, easy, readily understandable solutions is what they want. Get it all done before we grow up!

It is simple: the Devi cult proves the old man’s faith mistaken. But is father at the full height of his powers? A guru is he? Nor does Umaprasad consider the influence of his own ideas, how they upset the balance of local beliefs. Traditional societies require a religion that protects them against a wilful and flirtatious Nature. Any innovation which undermines that protection will automatically be felt a threat, this in turn hardening the beliefs, making them extreme. When put to test the religion must prove itself, show the miraculous is possible. Before, these beliefs belonged to the background of life, and were accepted and absorbed like the wind and rain: just more natural phenomena. In defending itself from a different faith the religion becomes artificial, increasing the fanaticism, as its ideas are forced to perform tasks for which they are not suited; metaphysical concepts are to think with, myths to touch the imagination and feelings; neither should be turned into medical prescriptions or political programmes; literalism the death of such beliefs, as the profound melts down into nonsense. When Umaprasad talks about progress, of scientific success, its medical miracles, locals try to repeat these results, but…nobody seems to realise they are talking about different ways of looking at the world. Science’s success due to a shift from the metaphysical and aesthetic to the material and the useful; from the perennial ‘why’ to the ever present ‘how’. Less ideas than a method. Not to contemplate but to experiment, which is fine if you are rich, young and secure, but less so if you live on the margins of survival.3

A proper education should seek to understand not just the benefits but the limits to an idea system, those dangers it poses to self and others. This asks too much in the modern world, where learning is no longer a craftsman’s workshop but a factory. Umaprasad is a student; his rite of passage is to be carried away by what he learns. To bite the apple without looking at the serpent’s wicked smile. No problem in the West. But he lives in a time and place where society is not strong enough to absorb or ignore his reckless days.

When he returns for the second time it is too late. You can’t put out a fire by talking to it. But on that first visit back, when Doyamoyee was not yet convinced of her divinity, he could have behaved wisely; not to dismiss this cultish faith but to engage with it emotionally and intellectually; in part by understanding how his ideas feed its fanaticism. A wise scepticism is not to diss such traditional beliefs but slowly decouple his wife from her disciples, in part my recognising his own faults. He had to recognise the validity both of the feeling and the faith that informs these people’s veneration; its power to give meaning to their lives. But he is too modern, thus too prejudiced, too foolish, to do so. You can’t combat emotions with words, which are more likely to enflame the passions than dampen them down. And he is alone. If only he had read Chekhov, acquired the wisdom that only art can bring.

Review: Goddess Devi

_____________

1. A good satire on such a character: Geoffry in Edgar Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder.

2. This distinction between East and West cannot be so sharply drawn in practice. The majority of undergraduates in Britain and the US also believe ideas a form of magic; that simply by stating the idea - broadcasting it to millions - it will do extraordinary things. Only a minority - those practised in the craft of concepts - know that ideas alone cannot bring about such miraculous changes.

3. We have to consider both beliefs and actual, practical results. To concentrate only on the latter is as irrational as to reject all useful improvements in the name of a faith. What a person feels and believes is as important to them as their plumbing and central heating.